Effective literature search requires the ability to critically evaluate the relevance, quality, and credibility of sources. Managing the vast amount of information, organizing it, and keeping track of the right literature search tools is necessary to gain new insights and accelerate research projects. Researchers use PubMed or PubMed Central as a primary resource for conducting literature searches due to its extensive database of biomedical literature. In this blog, we’ll discuss how researchers can use PubMed and R Discovery together to distil the most relevant insights for their work.

What is PubMed?

PubMed is an acronym for Public Medline maintained by the US National Library of Medicine and available to the public since 1996. This is a freely available database with more than 36 million citations to biomedical content from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

What is PubMed Central?

PubMed Central, often abbreviated as PMC, is a freely accessible digital archive maintained by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. It stores full-text scholarly articles in the field of life sciences and biomedicine. PMC goes beyond simply storing articles. It enriches them with additional information such as:

• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH):These are standardized terms that describe the content of the article, making it easier to find relevant publications.

• Unique Identifiers:Each article is assigned a unique identifier (PMID) which helps track and link it to other databases.

• Text Mining:PMC’s format facilitates text mining, a technique that allows researchers to analyze large amounts of scientific literature for patterns and trends.

PubMed vs PubMed Central – What is the difference?

While PubMed serves as a search engine for accessing citations and abstracts, PubMed Central is a digital archive hosting free full-text articles, serving the goal of providing open access to biomedical and life sciences literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). PubMed Central was launched in 2000 and contains around 9.5 million archived articles submitted by publishers or authors under NIH Public Access Policy.

While many academics still rely on PubMed to access research articles, there's a noticeable shift towards literature search tools such as R Discovery for better research reading experience. R Discovery aims to streamline and improve literature searches and research reading by enhancing different aspects of the process, leading to greater efficiency, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Let’s understand more about R Discovery and how it can help streamline literature searches for you.

What is R Discovery?

R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. R Discovery sources 250M+ research articles from trusted aggregators like PubMed, PubMed Central, CrossRef, Unpaywall, Open Alex and top publishing houses.

Here’s how R Discovery takes a step further from PubMed Central to enhance your research reading experience:

1. Personalized Recommendations - Read research effortlessly through R Discovery's Reading Feed, tailored to your interests, with personalized recommendations in an intuitive social media format.
2. Smart Search - Instantly access free scientific articles or academic research papers from targeted journals by simply entering keywords or topics, optimizing your research time and effort.
3. Organize and Collaborate - R Discovery's 'Bookmark' feature helps you to organize academic research papers into customizable lists within your library, facilitating seamless collaboration with others during the research discovery process.
4. Optimal Research Reading Experience - Enhance your research experience with research paper summaries, audio readings of research papers, and the ability to translate and read research in your preferred language, ensuring a more intelligent and efficient research reading journey.

How is R Discovery different from PubMed and PubMed Central?

1. PubMed is a repository and a traditional search engine while R Discovery is a recommendation engine that hosts entire PubMed content and offers GenAI capabilities.

   Each search on PubMed requires users to initiate a new search every time. With R Discovery, it’s different. R Discovery offers holistic research reading coverage by sourcing 250M+ articles from trusted aggregators, including PubMed and offers traditional search capabilities enriched with GenAI search. R Discovery’s recommendation engine helps users save their topics of interest once and receive recommendations each time they log in, freeing users from recurred search efforts. For instance, when searching PubMed for research on Covid-19 over five consecutive days, users must start anew each time. However, with R Discovery, users input their topic once and receive relevant research paper recommendations with each platform use, including newly published articles and the top 100 papers on the topic to ensure continuous updates. In addition to discovering relevant recommendations, users can also ask questions to R Discovery’s AI chatbot and get citation backed answers from 250M+ research articles. R Discovery also enhances research reading consumption and productivity in form of short summaries, audio papers and translated texts which are currently not available on PubMed yet.

2. R Discovery’s innovative research reading features helps you with targeted research reading and save time.

   R Discovery offers a suite of innovative benefits for enhanced research reading experience. Researchers can leverage the below benefits across the 250M+ research articles and boost their research reading productivity. Here are the exclusive R Discovery benefits researchers can access:

   Audio Papers – Researchers can read and listen to full-text research papers in their native language and get access to audio playlists of most cited papers. Researchers can also upload any full-text research paper and generate instant audio summaries.

   Paper Translations - Choose from 30+ languages to read research papers on R Discovery

   Multi-lingual Audio for Research Papers - Researchers with English as a second language can just upload a research paper, choose a language, and generate audio versions in their preferred language for both full text articles and paper summaries.

3. The PubMed search engine operates based on keywords, whereas R Discovery leverages concept matching (topic relevancy search) to recommend relevant papers based on your search queries.

   When searching for PubMed research articles, users must input precise keywords like author names, or journal titles to locate relevant articles, potentially leading to important literature being excluded if not matched with the entered keywords. Furthermore, aside from some newly published articles, searches on PubMed may yield repetitive results.

   When you read papers on R Discovery, the system pays attention to your activity and improves your recommendations for each session. On other search platforms, you'll typically see the keyword-optimized results every time you search unless new articles are published. However, with R Discovery you’re likely to find topic-relevant papers, which are often buried in traditional search engines because of low keyword usage. R Discovery identifies papers related to your specific area of interest and also improves its article recommendations based on your ratings, bookmarks, and reading history, making sure that you are always up to date on the latest research findings.

4. PubMed research articles only include biomedical and life sciences literature while R Discovery provides access to 9.5 million+ topics from across various research disciplines.

   R Discovery puts a world of research at researchers’ fingertips with 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, PNAS, Emerald Publishing and more. Its repository also undergoes regular quality and duplication checks to eliminate predatory journal content, ensuring that users are presented with the most reliable and cleanest research available. In summary, with R Discovery, researchers can access content available on PubMed and additionally more content sourced from trusted aggregators and quality journals.

How to use PubMed for research discovery and reading?

1. Go to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
2. Search for Covid-19
3. Browse through all PubMed documents on Covid-19
4. Click on PMCID to access full text on PubMed Central

Get a Better Reading Experience of PubMed Articles on R Discovery App

Looking for a better reading experience when it comes to PubMed research articles? Say hello to seamless research reading with R Discovery. Find the same papers on R Discovery and more along with full texts from PubMed Central and many more platforms. Here’s how you can use R Discovery for a smarter, more personalized approach to reading PubMed articles.

1. Visit the R Discovery website or install the free app from Google Play Store or Apple Store.

2. Set your goals, choose your research area and select your topic/s of interest.

   
3. For example, search for Covid-19 and click on the + icon to choose topic variations and get research recommendations.
4. The research recommendations start to appear as per your choices. As you like and dislike recommendations and personalize your reading preferences, you will see new and non-repetitive research article recommendations for research on Covid-19.
5. Access full texts or summarize articles for a better reading experience

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the difference between PubMed Central and R Discovery?

   PubMed Central is a specific repository for 10 million open access full-text scholarly articles in the biomedical and life sciences, managed by the National Library of Medicine. R Discovery, however, is an AI-powered tool that simplifies literature searches across a database of 40 million+ open access papers, including PubMed, PubMed Central, Microsoft Academic, and Crossref. It recommends top scholarly articles in a user's field of research, providing access to over 250+ million research papers. R Discovery is designed to save time and effort in keeping up with relevant research.

2. Why should I choose R Discovery App for reading PubMed articles?

   There’s a huge difference in the repository of articles held by PubMed and R Discovery. PubMed’s articles are mostly focussed on biomedical and life sciences literature, with 10 million papers available for open access. However, R Discovery is your one-stop literature search companion which hosts one of the largest scholarly content repositories with 150M+ peer reviewed Journal papers including 40M+ open access papers across 9.5M+ topics. Instead of you switching different tabs, conducting tedious search with keywords only to find limited papers that match, R Discovery elevates your research by showing you research based on your interest. R Discovery also recommends non-search optimized, hidden research papers, which are often not shown in PubMed.

3. Are PubMed articles free?

   Not all articles indexed in PubMed are freely available. PubMed itself is a database of citations and abstracts, and while it provides links to full text when available, the full-text articles may be behind a paywall or require a subscription. However, PubMed does link to free full-text articles available in PubMed Central and on publishers' websites when available.

4. What is the PubMed database used for?

   The PubMed database is used for searching and retrieving biomedical and life sciences literature to improve health both globally and personally. It supports the search of over 36 million citations and abstracts, facilitating research, medical education, and clinical practice. PubMed helps researchers, healthcare professionals, students, and the general public find relevant literature on a wide range of topics, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, healthcare systems, and preclinical sciences. It helps you keep up to date with the latest research findings and developments in the biomedical field.